Daniel Funke, September 12th 2019, Poynterhttps://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2019/here-are-4-new-terms-to-describe-online-deception-and-misinformation/ New terms for the misinformation trade The language surrounding misinformation seems to change as fast as the tactics used by the people who spread it. Terms that once meant one thing — “fake news,”for example — now mean something else, or are used so differently by different people that they […]Read More

  Hannah S. Chapman and Theodore P. Gerber, September 5th 2019, Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/09/05/russian-propaganda-isnt-effective-you-may-think/ Considering the Russian government’s disinformation efforts to polarize American voters during the 2016 presidential election, the United States and major corporations have been working to prevent the Kremlin from influencing the 2020 election via social media. But powerful governments use mass […]Read More

Pratik Jakhar, BBC News, September 7th 2019 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-49511231 According to China, its Confucius Institute is “a bridge reinforcing friendship” between it and the world. But to its critics the government-run body – which offers language and cultural programmes overseas – is a way for Beijing to spread propaganda under the guise of teaching, interfere with […]Read More

Google’s knowledge panels contain helpful facts and tidbits. But sometimes they surface bad information, too. Lora Kelley, The Atlantic, September 23rd, 2019 https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/09/googles-knowledge-panels-are-magnifying-disinformation/598474/ Martin John Bryant was lying on his bed in his parents’ house in Britain when he heard on the radio that Martin John Bryant had just committed mass murder. His first reaction […]Read More

Christina Nemr and Will Gangare, War on the Rocks. September 20th, 2019 In 2017, Myanmar’s military led a protracted propaganda campaign that resulted in mass murder. Over 25,000 of the country’s Rohingya people were raped or killed, while over 700,000 more were forced to flee. Though divisions between Myanmar’s Buddhist majority and Muslim Rohingya minority […]Read More

Zoe Schiffer, The Verge, September 16th 2019 https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/18/20872084/ai-deepfakes-solution-report-data-society-video-altered A new report from Data and Society raises doubts about automated solutions to deceptively altered videos, including machine learning-altered videos called deepfakes. Authors Britt Paris and Joan Donovan argue that deepfakes, while new, are part of a long history of media manipulation — one that requires both a […]Read More

Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Cybersecurity Policy, September 16th 2019, Facebook Newsroom https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/09/removing-coordinated-inauthentic-behavior-from-iraq-and-ukraine/ Today, we removed multiple Pages, Groups and accounts that were involved in coordinated inauthentic behavior on Facebook and Instagram. We found two separate, unconnected operations that originated in Iraq and Ukraine. We didn’t find any links between the campaigns we removed, but they both created […]Read More

AFP in France24, Washington DC, September 20th 2019 https://www.france24.com/en/20190920-twitter-closes-thousands-of-fake-news-accounts-worldwide Twitter said Friday it has closed down thousands of accounts across the world for spreading fake news as well as pro-government propaganda, including in places like the United Arab Emirates, China and Spain. Accounts coming from China seeking to sow discord among protesters in Hong Kong […]Read More

2016 Russian cyberattack on Ukraine intended to cause far more damage than it did. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/new-clues-show-how-russias-grid-hackers-aimed-for-physical-destruction/ ANDY GREENBERG, WIRED.COM –  9/14/2019, 8:15 AM For nearly three years, the December 2016 cyberattack on the Ukrainian power grid has presented a menacing puzzle. Two days before Christmas that year, Russian hackers planted a unique specimen of malware in the network of Ukraine’s […]Read More

Our Take The widely varying disclosure standards set by social media companies in some ways serve to confuse the general public, warned Director Laura Rosenberger in an interview with OpenSecrets. One of the goals of the Chinese Community Party’s disinformation campaigns on Twitter is to control the conversation surrounding the Hong Kong protests, China Analyst Matthew Schrader told the New York […]Read More